1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of computer systems. More specifically, the present invention relates to distributed computing among workstations.
2. Background Information
Distributed computing, i.e. having a set of independent tasks to be performed by multiple computer systems in parallel, has been of interest for sometime now to the artesian of the computer art; especially in the last few years where increasingly more powerful networkable workstations and networking equipment are being produced by computer and networking equipment manufacturers as a result of advances in microprocessor and networking technology. However, despite these recent advances, distributed computing using powerful networked workstations had failed to achieve its full potential. The greatest success has remained limited only to the harnessing of their resources to solve a large complex problem, such as fluid dynamic problems, when the networked workstations are not in use during the over night period. The greatest hurdles in preventing distributed computing using powerful networked workstations from being more successfully deployed during regular business hours are the human nature of not willing to share the machine resources of his/her workstation for fear of being adversely impacted, and the lack of support by the workstation operating systems in preventing a user from lowering the priority of guest overloads "forced" onto a workstation. As a result, very often, businesses are forced to equip many users with very powerful workstations, such that there will be sufficient computing power to meet the individual users peak computing demand, and yet these very powerful workstations are generally under utilized most of the times. Thus, a solution that can overcome at least the described hurdles, and enable distributed computing using powerful networked workstations to be more widely accepted, in particular, during periods, such as normal business hours, where the powerful networked workstations are used by the assigned users is desired. As will be readily apparent to those skilled in the art, from the detailed descriptions to follow, the present invention achieves these and other desirable results.